The Form of Selfhood: Elegy and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England

Abstract

In early modern England, “elegy” did not simply denote funeral poetry, as it does today. Rather, it referred to the erotic poetry of Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. These classical Roman authors self-consciously defined their poems as nequitia, “worthless,” in contrast with epic’s thematic gravity. However, in early modern England, this ostensibly trifling genre exerted just as much influence as the epic. “The Form of Selfhood” argues that the composition of elegies, due to the genre’s central role in early modern education, structured the consciousness of young English writers. In Rome, elegists had challenged epic’s superiority by underscoring elegy’s interest in subjectivity, personal affairs, and erotic persuasion. Elegy’s appeal to young men’s psychological experiences, as well as its oratorical and epistolary premises, eventually made it a standard genre in early modern grammar schools. While works like Castiglione’s The Courtier emphasized rhetoric’s importance for self-presentation, elegies modelled ethopoeia or how to make a persona. Furthermore, Ovid’s elegies, which present him from his amorous youth to his tearful exile, demonstrated how poetry might enable the (typically male) student to craft the gendered, professional, and political terms of his own subjectivity. In early modern England, elegy was institutionalized as a form to constitute and interrogate the self. This project thus develops studies of the reception of classical texts while reexamining our perception of early modern England’s classical canon. Literary scholars have scrutinized how canon formation reflects social dominance of certain race, gender, and cultural identities. I examine how the age, gender, and educational experiences of young male readers shaped the canon of Greek and Roman classics in early modern England. Classical reception studies typically foreground Virgilian genres (pastoral, georgic, and epic) when charting classical influence in early modern England. Epic, especially, has been prioritized as a vehicle for early modern conceptions of nation and empire. However, the emphasis of epic and Virgilian influence on English writers like Shakespeare and Milton in their “mature” phases obscures their use of elegy in their youth. Moreover, it obscures what young readers, both then and now, typically enjoy in this poetry: its erotic-persuasive utility, irreverent humor, and dramatic nature. In their youth, authors such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton use elegy to fashion identities around conflicts in love, friendship, and civic responsibilities. Furthermore, these poems reveal early literary and professional ambitions by which we can reconceptualize each of these poets’ reputations. Shakespeare’s use of elegy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona reveals his skepticism of Ovid as a model of self-presentation during a time otherwise marked by his Ovidianism; Donne’s elegies interrogate ideas of a fragmented, contingent self through the concept of sincerity; and Milton’s elegies reveal his attempt to fashion himself as a grave poet and make sense of his own self-division.